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A McConnell spokesman said Republicans are not trying to block the e-filing measure. “The request last year was to have one amendment and one hour of debate, which is about as little as you can get on a bill,” said Don Stewart, McConnell’s communications director.

He defended Ensign’s amendment as a transparency measure, akin to the underlying bill. He also argued that Democrats should not insist on passing the e-filing bill by voice vote when they’re talking about transparency.

Stewart said he did not know if anyone planned to offer the Ensign amendment again this year.

Feingold says he is working closely with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), chairman of the Senate Rules Committee and a lead supporter of the bill, to get it passed.

“It is unfortunate that there still is a Republican objection to passing the bill by unanimous consent despite its wide, bipartisan support,” Feingold said in a statement. “But I am confident we will be successful this year, and I appreciate the support of the majority leader and so many of my colleagues, Democratic and Republican, for this common-sense and long overdue reform.”

Key to getting a vote will be securing enough senators to kill the poison-pill amendment. There’s also the tricky issue of finding floor time, which is always a tall order in the Senate, all the more so these days as Congress tackles President Barack Obama’s ambitious agenda.

Plus, even its supporters admit that e-filing is not a sexy issue. So it’s hard to get senators to focus too much time on it or get constituents fired up to flood offices with phone calls.

Good-government groups are trying to drum up at least a trickle of grass-roots support for the measure. The Center for Responsive Politics gave the Senate an “F” on its recent Sunshine Week report card because of the filing issue and encouraged readers to call their senators and Roberts’ office.

In 2007, advocacy groups targeted McConnell for not allowing a vote on the bill by buying a billboard ad on Interstate 65 in Louisville, Ky. It asked: “What’s McConnell Hiding?”

House candidates have been able to file electronically since 1995, and Congress passed a law making e-filing mandatory for House candidates, presidential candidates and political action committees in 2001.

The Senate was exempted.

As a result, reports — save the Senate ones — are generally available online to the public within minutes of submission. Senate reports take up to 48 hours to appear in raw image-only form and a month to appear in the searchable database. That means, for example, that the data senators file in time for a mid-October FEC deadline are often not available by Election Day.

“Why should the public be forced to wait until after an election to find out which private donors foot the bill for the winner?” the Center for Responsive Politics argued in its report card.

And even once all the Senate data are keyed in, the information isn’t searchable in sophisticated ways — say, by donor name — as is the case with other filings.

FEC spokeswoman Mary Brandenberg, who fields plenty of calls from folks looking for Senate filings, said there’s definitely an interest in getting the Senate information up sooner.

“With all the other candidates and committees filing electronically, where you’re seeing reports instantaneously, I think that having to wait anywhere from a week to a month to see complete itemized Senate information can be tough.”

The proposed Ensign amendment to require disclosure of donors to nonprofits filing ethics complaints against members of Congress is extremely troubling. As noted in the article, the amendment is clearly aimed at deterring ethics complaints from being filed.

While "transparency" and "reform" advocates are rightly troubled by this amendment, they are generally less troubled with protecting from harrasment and intimidation the donors to independent groups that spend money speaking out in politics. Demands for full disclosure of all donors to 501(c)4, 527, issue committees, and other organizations that spend money independent of candidates and parties are common staples of the so-called campaign finance "reform" community. Apparently it's only when their oxe might be the one to be gored that they recognize the value of donor privacy.